I have paid special attention to this volume, covering Irish Art of the twentieth century and of the first decade of the twenty-first century because much of my writing and scholarship has been concerned with that period and with the lives of certain of the great painters who lived and worked then.

In analysing the major faults I find in Volume V, the obvious starting point is the one chosen by the authors of the Preface and joint editors of this fifth volume, Catherine Marshall and Peter Murray. They say that the project ‘emerged from a proposal to mark the centenary of the publication of Walter [George] Strickland’s seminal A Dictionary of Irish Artists in 1913’. They further claim that the Dictionary ‘remains the foundation stone upon which our understanding of Irish art history is based’ and that this is widely and warmly acknowledged. Their brief, which they say is shared with their advisory board, is ‘to bring Strickland up to date’.

One might well ask two questions: What has this narrow brief to do with the large number of essays on the selected twentieth-century artists of note together with the disparate essays on a wide variety of related or unrelated subjects? And why try to do it again when it has already been done with great thoroughness by Strickland’s distinguished successor, Theo Snoddy?